Ashley Appletree

I’ve been having a little problem with spambots behind the scenes in the comments lately, although 99% of it got stuck in the moderation queue and never made it to the page.
I’ve still decided to add a CAPTCHA system to cut down drastically on the time it takes me to go through them and delete them. A CAPTCHA is that thing that shows you some distorted words you have to type in to prove you’re actually a human and not a spambot. I know they’re a bit annoying but it’s the better option for me than checking the site every 15 minutes, sorry.

To compensate for that annoyance I cut the requirement to fill in an e-mail address to comment, since the bots got that down anyways. The input field for an e-mail address is still there, but you only have to fill it out if you want to use a Gravatar in your comment. Generally e-mail addresses are only visible to me as the site admin and not to other visitors on the website.

Another measure against spambots is that any link posted in the comments (this does not apply to the Website URL field) makes a comment go into a moderation queue and only shows up on the page once I approve it. So be prepared that it might take a while for your comment to show up if it contains a link.

Now that sounds all terribly complicated but what you really only need to do to post a comment is:

• fill in your name
• type your comment
• solve the CAPTCHA
• post it

Happy commenting.

What’s a blog post / news post again? Wait don’t tell me, I’ll check wikipedia.

Alright, so since the link to my RSS feed was tiny and on the bottom of the page until now, I made a much bigger button on the top right for it so it’s more obvious that there even is a feed. Which should make sure that you never miss a comic again, hooray. If you’re using an RSS reader that is.

If that’s not your thing you could try out one of these (free) sites:

Comic Rocket
When reading a comic through the Comic Rocket site it adds a little bar at the top of the comic page which let’s you navigate through the comic and, more importantly, places a bookmark on the last comic you read. So it makes it easy to pick up right where you left off, which can be quite useful if you don’t get around to reading comics daily or are working your way through the backlog of a comic in multiple sittings.

InkOUTBREAK
InkOUTBREAK does a similar thing, the difference being that it forms a queue of all kinds of comics with the ones you follow, and that have updated since your last visit, at the top. It seems to focus more on discovering new comics than keeping track of ones you already follow. So if you’re interested in that, try it.

Or, you could of course not join any sites and just remember when it’s Monday, Wednesday or Friday and surf to this page by yourself like our ancestors did for thousands of years. That’s cool too.